Enhancing B2B Manufacturing Customer Experience with HCL Commerce Cloud
The increased internet penetration and expectations for consumer convenience have led to a significant shift in shopping habits. It’s led manufacturing players to tap the growing demand from smaller towns and cities. As per the International Trade Administration, the global B2B ecommerce market is expected to be valued at USD $36 trillion by 20261, while as per Statista2, India's B2B e-commerce industry is projected to reach $59.8 billion by 2025, reflecting the country's rapid digital adoption in manufacturing.
As digital commerce grows, businesses also realize a growing demand for modern technologies, commerce cloud, and data analytics associated with market dynamics and customer interactions, getting closer to what their end users demand from their products. Automation, intelligent search, and post-order management are at the forefront of this revolution, revolutionizing manufacturing lines to achieve unprecedented precision while reducing costs.
This blog will explore how a cloud-based commerce solution enhances B2B manufacturing by streamlining sales, improving customer experiences, and driving digital transformation. Continue reading!
Key Challenges in B2B Manufacturing Commerce
B2B manufacturing concerns often face the following challenges in e-commerce:
Complex Pricing and Contract Negotiations
Complex pricing presents the challenges of managing multiple variables impacting price and dealing with diverse customer needs. It often involves many stakeholders within the buyer company, demanding a negotiation process, and management of price adjustments based on raw material cost fluctuations. You may also have to navigate intricate contract terms and understand complex legal requirements to ensure profitability while maintaining customer relationships.
Inefficient Order Management and Fulfillment Processes
Inefficient order management and fulfillment processes lead to major challenges of delayed deliveries, inaccurate orders, customer dissatisfaction, and lost sales, often stemming from poor inventory visibility issues, lack of system integration, and communication silos between departments. Moreover, managing product returns in such a setting without proper warehouse management leads to overstocking or stockouts.
Limited Self-service Options
There are limited customer self-service options and a lack of user-friendly interfaces for complex inquiries. This is because of multiple reasons, including factors like B2B products having intricate specifications and technical details, or customers requiring access to detailed order history and inventory levels, which require comprehensive product descriptions that may not be manually accessible.
Complex Integration of Legacy Systems with Modern Digital Platforms
It’s hard to connect outdated technology with the new features of today’s modern applications. Such integration of legacy systems with modern digital platforms is risky and poses many challenges to e-commerce for manufacturers. These include data incompatibility, lack of modern APIs, security vulnerabilities in older systems, and complex data migration processes, causing potential disruption to existing business processes.
How Can HCL Commerce Cloud Solve B2B Manufacturing Commerce Challenges?
As automated order processing and AI-powered inventory management take precedence, businesses excel in manufacturing e-commerce with HCL Commerce Cloud. It provides unmatched flexibility, supports ongoing growth and innovation, and gives businesses a significant competitive edge when it comes to everything required to conduct business online, whether it’s the introduction of a new product line, the adoption of a new sales strategy, or the analysis of an unexplored foreign market. It positions you as a market leader by allowing you to quickly pursue your ever-changing company needs.
Scalable Infrastructure
Scalability is essential for corporate expansion. Your efforts to grow into new product lines, client segments, and geographic areas will be thwarted by inefficiencies and lost possibilities if you don't have the proper architecture. It endangers your company. HCL Commerce Cloud supports complex product architecture and large transaction volumes. It allows you to:
- Accelerate geographic expansion by supporting multi-language, multi-currency, and region-specific compliance with ease. Handle these complexities without re-engineering allowing you to enter new markets swiftly.
- Manage complex catalogs smoothly by offering extensive product catalogs with varied pricing for different customer groups and regions, ensuring compliance with customer agreements and regional requirements as your business scales.
- Scale new capabilities effortlessly by delivering seamless buyer experiences by rapidly deploying new capabilities across all business units and geographies. Focus on driving customer value without the complexity of managing technology. It scales efficiently and offers agile support for growth and innovation.
AI-driven Personalization
HCL Commerce AI provides personalized consumer experiences based on previous interactions, preferences, and behaviors, enabling e-commerce for manufacturing. It also streamlines operations by automating monotonous procedures, thereby freeing up your teams to concentrate on what’s really important.
- Increase conversions by using insights from previous purchase behaviors to create cross-selling recommendations. It also analyzes campaign effectiveness in real-time and auto-suggests high-conversion offers. Offer personalized deals based on buyer patterns, driving better customer experiences by predicting and segmenting based on churn, retention, and abandoned carts.
- Real-time behavior tracking across all buyer interactions will dynamically deliver the right offers at the right time to the right audience, improving average order values and the purchased items.
Seamless Integrations
A fragmented ecosystem leads to inefficiencies and a poor customer experience. E-commerce for manufacturers must enable seamless solution integration, or you’ll be stuck managing chaos. HCL Commerce Cloud connects with ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems for a unified experience.
- Integrate third-party services easily to ensure smooth integration with specialized services like tax calculation, freight forwarding, and compliance tools. It facilitates these essential integrations using an architecture with robust APIs and pre-built connectors.
- Manage system downtime effectively when updates are required, ensuring they cause minimal disruption. Businesses can opt for architectures offering zero-downtime deployments or phased updates to reduce the impact on your business.
Omnichannel Engagement
In e-commerce for manufacturers, HCL Commerce Cloud unifies multi-channel operations to provide a seamless experience across all sales channels, both online and offline. It effortlessly integrates these channels, offering a unified view of customers, inventory, and orders at every touchpoint. It enables a consistent buying experience across web, mobile, and marketplaces.
- Automatic updates with minimal downtime minimize downtime by choosing an architecture that supports easy, low-risk, automatic updates and patches. Adopt new features and security enhancements without disrupting critical business functions.
- As your B2B operations evolve, personalization and integration become necessary. Select architectures offering cost-effective customization. Use pre-built integrations to reduce long-term development expenses.
What Are the Advantages of Choosing HCL Commerce Cloud?
Commerce Cloud is a proven e-commerce solution designed to support extremely high transaction and site traffic volumes on a single deployed instance, supporting all business models including B2C, B2B, B2B2C, D2C, and Marketplaces. Our integrated composable commerce solution is easily adoptable to best fit any situation.
- Leverage enhanced customer experience with self-service portals, real-time inventory tracking, and faster order fulfillment.
- With reduced manual effort, quicker quote-to-order cycles, and automated reordering, there is an increased sales efficiency.
- With its scalable and flexible cloud-based infrastructure, HCL Commerce Cloud facilitates corporate expansion.
- Real-time analytics and insights for supply chain optimization and demand forecasts assisting you to make better data-driven decisions.
- Start selling on day one with built-in ordering options and catalog management tools.
- Take advantage of the personalization capabilities by deploying relevant communications and promotions leading to improved customer satisfaction and higher ROI.
- Post-order management keeps your customers happy with appeasements for shipping, product discounts, or personalized offers.
Conclusion
More than just a tool, the choice of the right e-commerce solution impacts innovation capabilities, fosters growth, and guarantees operational excellence. Along with that, the ability to adapt to the updated requirements of the environment is an important factor in sales growth.
Where the players have long relied on the traditional sales channels such as distributors, dealers, and wholesalers, a key change seen in B2B manufacturing environments is the realization of the value behind direct customer interactions. Moving to incorporate B2C channels into your sales strategy has its benefits. However with this, you serve the risk of affecting channel relationships. Learn how to deal with such B2B channel conflicts in this playbook.
Equipped with the right mix of strategy and solution, so your B2B manufacturing enterprise can excel in providing enhanced customer experiences, while achieving your business goals.
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